Sit Back and Enjoy NASA’s Epic Landscape Photo of Mars

A rocky, reddish-brown Martian landscape with layered hills and mountains fades into a hazy, distant horizon under a pale sky. The terrain is dry and rugged, covered in loose rocks and dust.
A cropped view of the Curiosity Rover’s panoramic of the Martian landscape.

160 years ago pioneering photographers were among the first to capture the landscapes of the Sierra Nevada and Yosemite. One and a half centuries later, a robot on Mars is recording the first-ever views of Martian landscapes that bear a resemblance to those found in the southwestern United States.

The NASA Curiosity Mars rover recently captured a stunning panorama of the Gale Crater on Mars from its vantage point on Mount Sharp, a terrain that was created when an asteroid collided with the Red Planet billions of years ago.

The “mountains” that appear in the background of the image are not mountains at all, they are in fact the crater’s rim.

“The color in these images has been adjusted to match the lighting conditions as the human eye would see them on Earth,” NASA explains.

The image is a panoramic taken by Curiosity’s Mastcam instrument. NASA put out an incredible 30-second video that pans through the image allowing the viewer time to take in the amazing detail of the scene.

“30 seconds on Mars. Enjoy this recent look, courtesy of Mars Curiosity, at the view from the slopes of Mt. Sharp, with the distant rim of Gale Crater on the horizon,” NASA writes on X (formerly Twitter). “You can imagine the quiet, thin wind, or maybe even the waves of a long-gone lake lapping an ancient shore.”

Wide panorama of a rocky, reddish Martian landscape with hills in the foreground and hazy mountains in the distance under a pale sky. The scene appears barren and desolate.
The full panorama looking downslope across the crater.

Mashable reports that Mount Sharp is full of salty minerals and scientists believe that they were left behind by streams and ponds before all of the water of Mars dried up billions of years ago. By studying the area, scientists hope to discover why the Red Planet turned from being a watery world like Earth to a frozen desert.


Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

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